“The National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) issued yet another round of significant changes to the Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 4 (CIO-SP4) Request for Proposals (RFP) under Amendment 12 to the RFP. These changes, explained below, will impact offerors in mentor-protégé arrangements and may require them to submit a proposal revision…”
“Prior to this amendment, the CIO-SP4 solicitation did not require a protégé member to submit any experience. Accordingly, in Comput. World Servs. Corp., GAO found NIH was unable to support limiting the large business mentor’s experience in order to meaningfully consider the experience of the protégé member since the protégé was not required to submit any experience. This amendment now requires a protégé to submit some experience and therefore NIH can use the amendment to defend its decision to limit mentor experience references. It does appear that this amendment is now consistent with the GAO’s reasoning in Ekagra Partners, LLC and Comput. World Servs. Corp.
It also now seems consistent with SBA’s view that protégé firms cannot be held to the same standards as their mentor firms but can and should be required to meet some evaluation or responsibility criteria.[2] This is certainly not what many protégés were looking for and this protest seemed to backfire on protégés now requiring them to provide more than they were under the original RFP. The concern is that this modification may create a situation where some mentor-protégé teams, with new and small protégés, wasted months of time and funds chasing a CIO-SP4 RFP for which they may now not be eligible. Granted, this would only be for a protégé with zero experience or past performance in any of the functional areas (as the protégé need only provide one and it can be in any of the areas), but this could still impact certain teams. While this is an unfortunate scenario, it may be more in line with what GAO and even SBA would allow…”
“Further, Amendment 12 removed the requirement that offerors submit their proposals via the NIH Secure Email and File Transfer Service. It is now unknown how to submit proposal revisions, but NIH provided that the ‘method of submitting a proposal revision (e.g., email address or any other method) will be provided to offerors through another amendment at a later date.’ Therefore, offerors should stay tuned for the next amendment, which should notify them on how to submit their proposal revisions. Lastly, the amendment changed the Procuring Contract Officer (PCO) for agency-level protests from Rose Schultz to Ricky Clark…”
“5. Important Takeaways
In conclusion, mentor-protégé arrangements with small business mentors that did not submit two experience examples per task order area—and/or with a protégé firm that did not submit at least one experience example for any of the task order areas should now submit a proposal revision to ensure they are fully compliant with the new requirements. Further, if a protégé is not experienced in any of the key areas, that could be a major problem for those teams making them ineligible to bid. These proposal revisions are due 5:00 PM ET, January 21, 2022, but the method of submission is still unknown, so mentor-protégé arrangements should be on the lookout for a future amendment describing how…” Read the full article here.
Source: NITAAC Makes Major Changes to CIO-SP4 RFP – December 17, 2021. JD Supra.
